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It has been a relatively quiet time for the nascent VR/AR/MR/XR market lately, and so Digital-Den has been chugging along, doing some projects and demos, while mostly waiting and watching to see where the market will go. There have been some interesting new developments, but nothing special enough to make a big deal about here in this blog. That’s about to change, though.

A visit to the first Miami VR Expo held at Magic City earlier this month provided a refreshing taste of a new hot spot in the industry worth keeping an eye on.

The visit also provided a glimpse into some important trends in the industry, and the most obvious among those is the rise of VR venues like Miami’s VR Park.

Venues like The Void have been around in a few cities like New York for quite awhile, but now VR venues are springing up all over the place. Dave and Buster’s well publicized foray into the market with this month’s introduction of Jurassic World VR Expedition in over 100 of their locations across the U.S. and Canada could very well solidify the VR market in this direction.

That trend, combined with the emergence of low cost authoring solutions for web-based 3D and 360° media, could finally take VR and its close relatives AR and MR out of the lab and into the mainstream for good.

This could turn out to be a very interesting year for VR and and Digital-Den!

Please stay tuned…

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One of the last few posts on this blog appeared way back in the cold, dark days of February, and it was about an enlightening visit to New York (VR@NY V.1). That visit turned out to be a turning point for understanding where cutting-edge VR technology was going. Another visit to NY was overdue, so when NYVR’s August Meetup featured a great lineup plus a visit to The Void, it was impossible to resist. Here’s a blow by blow.

As usual, the NYVR schedule was jam packed full of interesting people showing off some awesome new ultra-cool technology. There was way too much to cover in detail, but here are just three of the better highlights.

Lewis Smithingham of 30 Ninjas shared some backstory and technical know-how from their work on the CONAN360° LIVE Pre-Show. It was fun to see how something like that was actually pulled-off successfully.

Robin Alter from Ultrahaptics gave an explained the demo he was showing that can give the feeling of touch using ultrasound waves sent to bare skin so that users can feel shapes, textures and other sensations sans gloves and controllers. Here’s a picture of the actual demo and a promotional video that he showed about Ultrahaptics collaboration with Dell, Nike and Meta.

Let’s be honest. As great as all that was, the real draw for the evening was the chance to see The Void, and it turned out to be every bit as engaging as it was billed to be. That’s not to say there weren’t glitches — there were, but is was worth it to get to the end and take down that humongous Marshmallow Man. While I didn’t personally smell the burnt marshmallow, others said they did. I’ll have to trust them on that 🙂

Now, what does this have to do with Digital-Den and our future directions? Quite a bit, actually. Stay tuned for a post about that in the near future…

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Wow! I’m just back from an excellent adventure out on the front lines at Silicon Valley VR Expo (SVVR), and there were an impressive number of “take-aways” besides the swag!

First, there was a very nice series of back-to-back keynotes by Tony Parisi (Unity Technologies), Nonny de la Peña (Emblematic Group), Rikard Steiber (HTC), and Kent Bye (Voices of VR). These are already posted, so you can check them out for yourself.

Beyond that, here are a few other “notes” from the event.

Platforms
There were a couple of well attended presentations on virtual worlds, now being re-branded as “social VR,” that are “coming soon.” Philip Rosedale’s overview of High Fidelity was particularly compelling.

Of course, for those of us that have been around awhile, these platforms aren’t exactly out of the blue, but there appeared to be a surprising number of people in the audience who weren’t aware that things like AltspaceVR and VRChat are the new kids on the block. Talk about déjà vu! It felt just like 2006 all over again. Things are bound to get “interesting” when these old gorillas finally come out and descend upon the VR world in the “near future.” Here’s a nice article for homework if you are among those that aren’t already familiar with the players in the space. Social VR: Who Is Going to Get It Right First? (Alice Bonasio, Upload VR)

Standards
There were a couple of excellent panels about standards that established that both authors and consumers “might” be able to look forward to platform independent tools and content, eventually, but there is still a long road ahead.

Over the course of the event it also became fairly clear that XR has emerged as the much needed general moniker to encompass the AR/MR/VR continuum.

On the horizon…
There were a couple of presentations about potential authoring platforms beyond the current “go-tos” of Unity and Unreal. These aren’t going to be something that takes the VR world by storm this year, but they definitely worth watching in the longer term!

It had been awhile since the last New York VR Blitz back in June 2016, so it’s been time to consider another one for awhile now. The monthly NY VR Meetups were serving as a prime suspect for an excuse, and then a really cool event from the NY VR AR Association scheduled on back-to-back evenings with a NY VR Meetup came along. Bingo, time to grab an Acela! Here’s a blow-by-blow account of the adventure and some “take aways” at the end…

This first stop on the NY VR tour was hosted by Kris Kolo, NYC Chapter President & Global Executive Director, NY VR AR Association” and moderated by Chris Pfaff PGA New Media Council member and CEO Tech Media.

Paul Cheung, Director of Interactive for the Associated Press shared “lessons learned” about filming in 360° under normal journalistic conditions. The insights he shared were valuable, and among them was the useful tidbit that if you happen to already have the right phone, then a Samsung 360° camera is a better investment than a Ricoh Theta.

Alissa Crevier, Global Head of Partnerships for Littlstar gave a great explanation of their platform and trends in the content delivery end of the industry. Then Christian Egeler, Director of VR/AR product development, Verizon’s Envrmnt provided a nice hint as to what to watch for from them (an authoring and delivery system).

Finally, the panel discussion at the end included an insightful suggestion that the VR industry needs to adopt the concept of “responsive design” from web design and apply it to VR content delivery so that developers and consumers don’t have to navigate the current morass of development and delivery options. So true!

Thursday started out with a visit to Samsung’s store that was one of the spots mentioned in the New York Post article that had helped to inspire this New York adventure. Here’s a promotional video and a few articles about the store to give you a sense of what’s there.

It was an interesting excursion, but it was early in the day, not a lot was going on and there wasn’t any content that was different than what’s already available to any Gear VR owner. Most importantly, beware, Samsung’s “Gear VR 4D Chair” can deliver a mild case of whiplash that can cause a headache worse than a VR headache. Yep, ouch!

This was a second spot mentioned in that New York Post article that helped to inspire this trip, and it had a very different vibe than the Samsung’s 837 store. It is billed as “America’s First VR Cinema & PlayLab,” and it has the potential to be a more engaging experience. Here’s a short video to give you a sense of the space.

Again, it was still fairly early in the day on a Friday, not a lot was going on and there wasn’t any content that was much different than what you can already see if you happen to have your own VR lab with the same rigs. But how many people have that, right? 😉 This visit was still a more interesting experience with better demos than the Samsung 837 store, and while I didn’t get a chance to talk with any of the founders in depth, I had a lot of fun talking with their young, enthusiastic and downright adorable crew.

One of the many highlights of the evening was Dario Lavarde of HTC VIVE presenting about the recently announced VIVE Tracker. Here’s a promotional video about it, and Dario even showed a demo of authoring for the tracker in Unity 3D plus shared his slides.

Here’s a run down of some ruminations from the overall VR@NY experience…

Samsung and Oculus need to work on their marketing of VR experiences.

Stay away from Samsung’s Gear VR 4D Chair!

VR and AR demos are more interesting to the audience if you invest in setting up a monitor to show what the viewer is seeing.

If you’re going to host immersive experiences, go to great lengths to get unique content not available to consumers that already have headsets.

360°video “might” be a killer app for VR because it’s easy, fast and cheap content that an average consumer can create. Better, cheap and widely available 360° cameras that can stream live video are needed, though.

If you have a compatible Samsung phone, get the Gear VR 360° Camera.

Parallel to the exhaustively covered VR Headset wars, there is a far quieter, but probably more crucial war going on among immersive content delivery platforms. The players range from brand specific options like Samsung/Oculus/GearVR stores, Sony Playstation and VivePort to the broader cross-platform, device independent content delivery services such as YouTube 360° and Facebook 360° video on the low end on up to premium content delivery platforms like Littlstar.

The VR and AR industry needs to adapt the concept of “responsive design” from web design and apply it to immersive content to result in something like “responsive immersive content design, authoring and delivery” so that developers and consumers don’t have to navigate the morass of options currently available. Someone needs to provide a way for publishing and viewing 360° video, WebVR and Unity 3D/Unreal authored VR/AR/MR experiences for everything ranging from desktop or mobile to low end Cardboard/View-Master/GearVR/Daydream phone based viewers all the up to Oculus and Vive headsets. In truth, a movement towards this is already in the air, and while it is certainly a bear of a challenge to tackle, it will be worth it because the most inclusive and adaptable platform(s) will win the immersive VR/AR/MR content platform battle.

IMHO, anyway 😉

So, wow, that was a mind-blowing few days! This report doesn’t even include some other fun real life (RL) adventures that slipped in along the way between the highlights above. Check out Mary Hopper’s blog post for a more complete trip report…

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AR in Action was at MIT this week, and it was fantastic! John Werner served as host to a vast who’s who of tech, and the the presentations ranged from informative and entertaining to mind blowing. There were too many highlights to cover here, but a few of my favorite were Alan Kay’s explication of some issue’s with current technology, Steve Mann’s stunning taped performance, Ken Perlin’s presentation of his vision for interaction in the future, and of course, Digital Den’s friend Rus Gant’s perspective on uses of AR in museums. This is just a sample of the multitude of great talks.

There were also many interesting demos set up, and the one from Samsung Research about WebVR and Sketchfab was one the most likely to have a serious impact on directions in R & D at Digital Den.

We are just past the season for getting toys, and boy did we do that — we added a bunch of cool new toys to our “Pop-up Lab” that will be available to play with during our events and workshops. Here are the highlights of what we have recently added to the collection…

Watch for another round of purchases this quarter that will most likely include a TPCast Wireless attachment and trackers for the Vive, a Google Daydream as well as an AR headset (Microsoft Hololens or Meta). Then there will also be a lot of new development software and in-house applications to share. Please stay tuned…

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In case you’re wondering, yes, we’re still here. It has just appeared to be quiet, “too quiet,” because an avalanche of new hardware and software has been rolling in over the last few months (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Playstation VR etc, etc, etc.). That means that, appropriately enough, the holiday season has been taken up with some serious playtime, and no one’s complaining about it, mind you 😉 Stay tuned for news about our new toys, chances to play with them at public events, and best of all, new in-house demos exploring our new capabilities. Whew, whew!
In the meantime, Happy New Year!